The Banner has a subscription to republish articles from Religion News Service. This story by Bob Smietana, was published Jan. 12, 2026 on religionnews.com. It has been edited for length and Banner style.
“Do what God has called you to do,” Nicole Martin quotes her great-grandmother, Estelle Cartledge, recalling her work alongside her husband building a church in Pittsburgh during a time of segregation when women leaders were viewed with suspicion.
Martin hopes to follow that advice in her new role as president and CEO of Christianity Today, the venerable evangelical magazine founded by Billy Graham 70 years ago, where she has been tasked with helping define CT for the future.
The past decade has marked a tumultuous time for the magazine, once seen as the flagship publication for evangelicals. There have been critical and popular successes such as The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, a podcast about the fall of megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll, and groundbreaking reporting about scandals involving failings of evangelical leaders, including the late Ravi Zacharias.
But there has also been political controversy, particularly in the wake of a 2019 op-ed from former editor Mark Galli, who declared that Donald Trump was unfit to be president of the United States. That op-ed, published weeks before Galli’s retirement, made U.S. national headlines and stirred up contention between supporters of Trump, like Franklin Graham, son of Christianity Today’s founder, and conservatives dubbed ‘Never Trumpers.’
The magazine had also had leadership turnover, with four editors-in-chief over the past six years, and faced layoffs, and dealt with the fallout of an investigation that found CT’s leaders had ignored allegations of sexual harassment for years. Just this past week, CT learned that best-selling author Philip Yancey, a long-time columnist and contributor, was withdrawing after confessing to an eight-year affair. Several high-profile reporters left in recent months, with former news editor Daniel Silliman saying he left because of “significant disagreements with the new leadership, both practical and philosophical.” Silliman joined The Roys Report as a senior reporter/editor at the beginning of December.
Martin said CT has had to own up to its past mistakes and learn some hard lessons. Her focus now is on building a healthy work culture, helping build the staff, and focusing on journalism that tells the “stories of the kingdom of God.”
“We own that we have not always been a healthy culture,” she said. “We own that we have sometimes had to release people for reasons that I wish we didn’t have to. We own that people have left because of contention. We don’t ignore that, but we learn from that.”
Part of that learning process involves reading every exit interview for signs of where things went wrong and then working on making improvements.
She is also working on the publication’s overall strategy. She said that in the past, CT has at times tried to do too many things and lost sight of its core mission.
“We had to ask ourselves, are we a spiritual formation ministry that works through journalism and storytelling?” she told RNS during an interview in Wheaton, Ill., where CT rents co-working space after selling its office building in 2024. “Or are we a journalism and storytelling ministry that aims to help people make sense of the world from a biblical lens, and then spiritual formation happens?”
While spiritual formation is important, Martin said, CT’s main mission is journalism and storytelling. Now the task is to determine which stories to tell and in what format. That’s an ongoing strategic conversation, said Martin, who has been in her new role for about a month.
Christianity Today’s newest editor in chief, Marvin Olasky, who took on that role after former editor Russell Moore moved over to a new role at CT, recently outlined the publication’s beliefs and its approach to journalism in a “Declaration of Principles.” They include a “big tent” view of evangelicalism, where folks with common beliefs can still disagree.
“We are not saying we are all things to all people,” Martin said. “We’re going to be who God has called us to be as orthodox evangelicals. But within that, we’re going to have Republicans and Democrats. Within that, we’re going to have a welcome space for people to share their differences and their commonalities.”
The Bible, she said, is CT’s foundation, and she believes a shared faith in the Bible and in Jesus can overcome political differences.
“If we lose the art of civil dialogue in the Christian tent, we have lost our faith,” Martin said. “There has to be a faith impulse that says, ‘I want civil dialogue, even when we disagree.’”
Martin said she wants CT to be courageous and stand for the Bible, but not to be divisive. “We reserve the right to celebrate and criticize people from any political area, especially because we resist the urge to be in a camp,” she said. “We just want to stay stable on the Word of God.”
Ed Stetzer, dean of the Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, said CT remains influential but still has a lot of work to do.
“I think Christianity Today is still seen by many in the secular press world as the voice of evangelicalism,” he said. “I think its greatest challenge now is, can it reclaim the conflict, regain the confidence of a significant swath of evangelicalism that it’s lost?”
In announcing Martin’s new role, the Rev. Claude Alexander, chair of CT’s board, cited her commitment to the Christian message and her skill in relaying it. “She brings unquestioned commitment to the gospel of Jesus Christ and an unrivaled ability to promote and defend its claims effectively across various constituencies,” he said.
As the first Black woman to serve as CT’s president, Martin knows she’ll face some skepticism, especially at a time when some conservative Christians have come to view diversity as problematic.
But she is who she is and embraces that.
“I think I understand how God has made me,” she said. “None of us gets to select our gender, none of us gets to select our race. We’re born as we’re born. I embrace and understand my ethnicity and my gender, and I see them as assets, not just for CT, but also for the Kingdom.”
She also said diversity is God’s idea, drawing on an image from the New Testament book of Revelation about people “from every nation, tribe, people and language” being part of God’s kingdom.
“That’s not a cultural view,” she said. “That’s a biblical view. We’re trying to be biblical.”
c. 2026 Religion News Service